Pricing the Soul Out of Washington, D.C.

Bettmann, Corbis

By the mid-1930s segregation had forced many black families in Washington into alley housing.

By Maurice Jackson

Washington, D.C., the marble city begun by slave labor in the
1790s, is again in the news. As charges of campaign violations
swirl around Mayor Vincent Gray, and the chairman of the city
council and another member resign after admitting financial
misdeeds, it is often forgotten that Washington once stood as a
"city on a hill" to the nation's African-Americans. Just as the
Puritan John Winthrop held the biblical image up as the ideal for
Boston, so the District has long served as a beacon to